Current visual navigation interface systems (“visualization interfaces”) for mobile devices typically suffer from drawbacks in terms of their convenience of use and in the realism of the visual simulation which they provide. Visualization interfaces for mobile devices usually require active user input to provide an orientation for visualization. The user may provide the input via an auxiliary device such as a mouse, a keypad, or a touch-screen cursor. In this case, if a user wishes to obtain visual information corresponding to a particular viewing orientation, he or she may be required to point a cursor or mouse in the selected direction. This active input requires the use of a free hand, which can be inconvenient when the visualization interface is incorporated in a handheld device such as a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), already occupying the use of one hand.
Even those visualization interfaces that are equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers and obtain location coordinates thereby, generally provide two-dimensional “map” views with only limited capability to modify the map orientation. In these systems, the user's location may be highlighted on the two-dimensional map, and as the user's location changes, the map updates sequentially to reflect the location change. The sequential map images appear in a “north up” configuration, or in a “course up” configuration as the user is moving in a particular course direction. Additionally, current GPS-based visualization interfaces have only limited capabilities for three-dimensional simulation because the GPS reception system usually does not provide attitude (angular orientation) information.
It would thus be desirable to provide a manually convenient visualization interface that allows a user to navigate in a map or visualize an environment in three dimensions in motion or at rest with flexibility in terms of view orientation.